House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (14 page)

And, unfortunately, the PRH seemed to be waking up—some, at least—to the fact that Manticore’s warfighting technology was better than its was. Manticoran intelligence, civilian and military alike, suggested the Peoples Navy still hadn’t figured out how far behind the RMN’s actually
deployed
hardware it was, far less how far behind Gram and the rest of the Star Kingdom’s “black” R&D it was, yet it was clearly making a push to improve its position.

Possibly the fact that the Andermani Empire had finally bought the Astral Energetics’ version of the laser head and put it into service in 1872 had something to do with that. All indications were that Astral’s weapon was markedly inferior to Section Thirteen’s latest variant, yet the mere fact that the Andermani possessed it at all represented a closing of their capability gap vis-à-vis the Star Kingdom. Fortunately, Emperor Gustav appeared to have little interest in distracting Manticore from its concentration on Haven, at least at the moment, but the IAN’s introduction of the weapon into open service had to have spurred Havenite interest in acquiring an equivalent capability. At the moment, there was no evidence Technodyne had a laser head design to sell, but like most Solarian transstellars, Technodyne had never worried all that much over abiding by export restrictions if the customer could meet its price. That being the case, there was no reason to think it would hesitate to acquire a licensed version of Astral’s design and happily sell it to the PRH, especially since the SLN didn’t even seem to have noticed its existence. The League certainly hadn’t made any move to prevent its proliferation, at any rate. Yet.

Even if that changed, Technodyne wouldn’t care as long as it didn’t get caught by someone it couldn’t buy off, and that sort of Solarian arms inspector no longer existed. And if the Peeps were short on hard currency, Technodyne could work with that, as well. After all, the Peeps had all those political prisoners to provide the labor force they needed, which meant they were actually able to deliver raw and semi-refined materials to Technodyne—via the Junction, of course—more cheaply than Technodyne could have purchased the same materials from a source in the League. All indications were that Technodyne was bleeding the Peeps’ ruthlessly, but it was a cost they could bear, at least for now.

The fact that the state owned every Havenite freighter in existence helped hold down costs, as well, he supposed. But Roger was right about the capability of the sensor suites built into the Peep freighters passing through the Junction or trundling about the Manticoran Binary System itself to deliver or pick up cargoes. They were spy ships, plain and simple, and their presence only underscored Roger’s wisdom in setting up Project Gram on
Weyland
, where those sensor suites never got a peek at any of the hardware Jonas Adcock and his people were beginning to surreptitiously test in the Unicorn Belt.

And it helps that Klaus Hauptman’s such a stiff-necked bastard, too,
Cromarty reflected.
The man holds grudges like a Gryphon
Highlander
, and he absolutely
loathes
Summercross and Lebrun. Doesn’t stop him from doing business with Summercross, or even North Hollow, but that’s
just
business, and he doesn’t trust any of them any farther than he could jump without counter-grav. The man might as well have the Star Kingdom’s coat of arms tattooed across his backside when it comes to national security, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before anybody in the Association or the Liberal Party hears a single word out of
him
about the toys he’s been building for Gram over the last couple of T-years
.

“You’re probably right, Your Majesty,” he acknowledged out loud. “But unless we’re prepared to call Nouveau Paris on it, it’s going to be hard to make a case for denying them the access they’re asking for. We don’t have to give them favored-star nation status, but we’re going to need something more than ‘because you’re rotten people’ if we’re not going to give them at least the same degree of access we give everyone else.”

“Oh, we’ll
give
it to them, all right,” Roger said with an unpleasant smile. “But I’ll have my kilo of flesh from Summercross and Lebrun first.”

“Your Majesty?” Cromarty’s expression was wary, and Roger’s smile turned still colder.

“I should never have accepted all the stipulations and restrictions the two of them insisted on when we annexed the terminus,” he said, and it was Cromarty’s turn to grimace in agreement.

Roger had been right about the Opposition’s inability to stop him from making his infant daughter the Duchess of Basilisk, but they’d held out for a generous grab bag of concessions before they’d agreed to acquiesce and make Parliament’s approval unanimous. The offer to
make
that approval unanimous in return for those selfsame face-saving concessions had been more than Roger and his ministers had been able to resist, given the emphatic way it had countersigned the Crown’s new policy where control of the Junction’s termini was concerned. Unfortunately, no one had repealed the law of unintended consequences, and the restrictions which had resulted had grown steadily more irksome over the past decade.

“The infrastructure in Basilisk—in the system itself, especially in Medusa orbit, not just on the terminus—is growing even faster than I expected,” Roger continued. “It’s more valuable to our economy and more tempting to someone like the Peeps—or Gustav—than I anticipated, too, and thanks to the way we pussyfooted around with Summercross and Lebrun, we don’t have the wherewithal in-system to look after it properly. So I think it’s time we stamp the entire terminus with a big, shiny Manticore.”

“In what way, Your Majesty?”

“I’m going to create a formal naval station in Basilisk. It’s going to be a standing naval presence.” Cromarty looked faintly alarmed, and the King shook his head quickly. “Oh, I’m not going to renege on our promise not to fortify the terminus, Allen! Not that I wouldn’t
like
to, you understand, but there’s only so much blood in the turnip, and if I have to choose between a few more ships-of-the-wall and fortifying the Basilisk Terminus, I’m afraid I’m going to have to opt for the wallers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t permanently station a division of cruisers and a squadron of destroyers or so in Basilisk to keep an eye on things. And on any ‘civilian Peep freighters’ that happen to pass through. And if people like Summercross and Lebrun happen to get the message that we’re through rolling over for the Peeps because we’re somehow responsible for being the ‘reasonable’ ones, I’m just fine with
that
, too.”

Cromarty managed not to wince, but it was hard as he contemplated the screams of protest bound to come at him from both left and right when he announced
this
little decision. On the face of it, it should have been a complete nonissue, but both the Conservatives and the Liberals were going to recognize Roger’s challenge, his warning that he was through deferring to their sensibilities, and that was going to guarantee an ugly reception. But over the past twenty T-years, he’d learned to recognize when there was no point trying to talk Roger Winton out of something.

Besides,
he thought,
he’s right. It
is
time we made that message of his crystal clear, and not just to the
Peeps.

“Very well, Your Majesty,” he said aloud, “I’ll have a word about it with Abner and Admiral Styler this afternoon.”

May 1878 PD

“
SO
,”
KING ROGER III SAID
, reaching down to ruffle Crown Princess Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton’s feathery curls gently, “was it a good birthday?”

“Oh, yeah,” Elizabeth replied emphatically, leaning back against her tall, broad-shouldered father and smiling up at him. She was a slender, small-boned child—she took after her mother in that respect—but muscular, with a passion for soccer and horses. As far as he could tell that equestrian fixation was something every girl child ever born shared, but she seemed to have caught a more intense case than most.

“I missed Uncle Jonas this year,” she continued, “but everyone else was great. And I really liked the new grav ski. I can hardly wait to try it out!”

“Oh?” Something devilish glinted in Roger’s eyes. “Well, just be sure you take Sergeant Proctor along when you do.”

“Daaaddy!”
Elizabeth rolled her huge, expressive eyes with a martyred expression. Her devastating eleven-year-old crush (well,
twelve
-year-old now, he supposed, if he was going to be accurate) on Sergeant Bynum Proctor of the King’s Own Regiment was something of a sore point with her at the moment.

“Roger,” Queen Consort Angelique said, never looking up from the forestry journal on her reader, “don’t tease your daughter. I believe we’ve discussed that.”

“
Tease
my daughter?” Roger looked at her with wide eyed innocence. “I am shocked—
shocked
, I tell you!—that you could
possibly
accuse me of such a thing, Angel! I’m innocent as the new fallen snow.”

“There
is
no new fallen snow in Landing, even in the middle of winter,” Angelique pointed out, looking up at last. “And if there were, you wouldn’t be as innocent as it . . . if that sentence makes any sense at all.” She furrowed her brow for a moment, considering it, then shrugged. “You’re about as ‘innocent’ as that fellow from Old Earth you were telling me about the other day. Who was it? Macky somebody?”

“That was
Machiavelli
,” Roger said severely, fully aware that Angelique had remembered the name perfectly well. Elizabeth realized it too, judging from her chortle, and he looked down at her sternly.

“Don’t you go around laughing at Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, Missy! He wasn’t a very nice person, but any ruler worth his—or her—unscrupulous salt should at least be familiar with his advice.”

“You obviously are, anyway,” his daughter replied in a voice which was just slightly undutiful. “If you’ve got that entire name memorized, anyway!”

She made a face, and Roger shook his head. Elizabeth was an excellent student, but at this point in her life she saw no reason why anyone should expect her to remember names and dates. They were boring. Besides, that was the sort of thing uni-links were for storing. Still, judging by the questions she’d been asking lately, she was beginning to develop some of that deep interest in history her grandmother had taken pains to inculcate into her own heir. It wouldn’t be much longer, Roger estimated, before
she
was the one rattling off names and dates and watching carefully from the corner of her eye to be sure her father was suitably impressed with her erudition.

Monroe made a soft, amused sound from his shoulder, and Elizabeth looked up suspiciously.

“You’re thinking something funny about me again,” she accused.

“Never!”
her father assured her.

“Oh, yes you are. I can always tell by watching Monroe.”

“I have absolutely no responsibility for the peculiar things ’cats find humorous, Beth. Some of them have very strange senses of humor, as far as I can tell. In fact,
he
was probably the one thinking something ‘funny’ about you, now that I think about it.”

“You might want to remember, Bethie,” Angelique observed, “that one of the first things any successful politician has to learn is how to lie convincingly.”

“You’re not helping here, Angel,” Roger said, as their daughter grinned triumphantly at him. “And I’m going to remember this conversation the next time I hear Michael asking you what kind of nuts he needs to plant in the palace garden to grow a crown oak.”

“Don’t you
dare
put him up to that again, Roger Winton!”

Angelique shuddered, and Roger chuckled.

Michael was still shy of eight T-years old, but he was obviously at least as smart as his sister, in a tunnel vision, narrowly focused, seven-year-old sort of way, and that could have . . . interesting consequences in the strangest places. Like where crown oaks were concerned.

His mother remained active in the Star Kingdom’s Royal Society of Silviculture, and Michael had accompanied her to Sphinx two years ago when she went to dedicate a new Sphinx Forestry Service preserve in East Slocum. It was the first time he’d actually seen a crown oak—eighty meters tall, with arrow-shaped leaves broader than his own chest had been at the time—and he’d instantly wanted one for his very own. He’d been even more impressed by that than by the treecats who always seemed to turn up to inspect members of the royal family whenever they visited Sphinx, and he’d pestered his mother to buy one for him all the way back to Landing. Expense had been no object, as far as he was concerned, since he’d had the same attitude towards money all five-year-olds—and politicians—seemed to possess. There was always plenty of it in someone else’s pockets; all they had to do was pry it loose for their
own
pockets. His parents were working hard on convincing him otherwise (for a lot of reasons), but they’d made far more progress with his older sister than with him. So far, at least.

Angelique had stepped on the “But
why
won’t you buy it for me?” semi-whine, only to have him hit on the brilliant inspiration of growing one of his own. After all, there was plenty of room in the palace gardens, wasn’t there? And his mother had her own personal landscaping projects of her own, didn’t she? And a crown oak
nut
had to cost a
lot
less than a whole tree, didn’t it, Mommy?

It had taken her the better part of an hour, but she’d finally gotten him to understand that a crown oak that size was at least the better part of four or five hundred T-years old. In fact, it was probably two or three times that age, and that meant it wasn’t exactly something even a queen could just whistle up whenever she wanted one.

That was the point at which Roger had come on the scene, and, unaware of the ordeal his wife had just been through at the hands of their focused, maddeningly persistent five-year-old extortionist, laughingly suggested to Michael (who’d recently discovered the Old Earth fairy tale about Jack and the Beanstalk) that if they just planted the right kind of nut in the garden, they could probably have a proper crown oak by next Tuesday.

He’d thought for a while that Angelique was going to commit regicide—not that any court would have convicted her, once the jury heard the extenuating circumstances—when Michael turned triumphantly around to his mother and said “
Daddy
says I can have one!”

“I won’t put him up to that, if you’ll stop undermining my aura of truth and virtue in my daughter’s eyes,” he said now.

“Too late, Dad,” Elizabeth told him with twelve-year-old cynicism. “I wasn’t going to mention this, but you and I need to have a talk about the Tooth Fairy, too.”

“Oh, no, you don’t!” He slid an index finger under her chin, tipping her head back to smile down at her and shook the other index finger under her nose. “Don’t you go disillusioning me with your cynical skepticism!”

“All right, I won’t,” she said, but there was a calculating look in her eye, and he raised one eyebrow as he saw it.

“And just what is this unusual restraint on your part going to
cost
me?” he inquired.

“I want to start learning about your job,” she told him with unusual seriousness, looking suddenly considerably older than her age. “
Really
learning, I mean, not just reading about it and watching holos. I mean, I know it’ll be years and years before
I
have to be Queen, but Jacob and Elisa have been telling me how much help you were to Grandmama way before you ever had to be King yourself. And I know how hard you’re working—and how
worried
you are, Dad.” She put her arms around his waist, hugging him tightly, pressing her cheek against his chest. “You try not to show it, but I know. And I want to help.”

“Beth,” Angelique said softly, setting aside her book reader at last, “you just turned twelve, for goodness sake, and your Dad’s going to be King for decades yet. Probably at least another T-century! I know you want to help, honey, but there’s no need to be rushing
that
hard to grow up.”

“I didn’t say I want to grow up, Mom,” Elizabeth turned her head to look at her mother without releasing her hug on her father. “And I know there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t understand even if you and Dad explained it to me. But I
do
know how worried Dad is, and I know he’s doing stuff with Uncle Jonas that we’re not supposed to tell anybody about. I’m sure he’s doing lots of other stuff we’re not supposed to mention, either. I know I’m just a kid. I can’t fix the things that are worrying him—and
you
, even if you don’t want Mikey and me to know about it. But I do want to understand as much of it as I can, and if there’s any way I can help Dad—even if it’s just letting him talk to me the way he does to you when he says he’s ‘bouncing ideas off you’—then I want to do it.”

“But you’re so young.”

Angelique glanced at Roger, her distress obvious, and he knew what she was thinking. Her marriage to him had turned her own life inside out; she didn’t want to see her daughter rushing to discard her childhood and embrace the same sacrifices. Not yet. Not when she was still their little girl, despite the odd bursts of maturity that wandered through her from time to time . . . and despite what the destiny of her birth was going to demand of her one day.

“You’re right when you say you probably wouldn’t understand some of the stuff we grown-ups worry about,” Angelique continued, her gray eyes dark. “But some of it’s pretty scary, Bethie. There are parts of it I wish
I
didn’t know, and I’m sure your Dad feels the same way about it. Can’t you just let the grown-ups deal with it for at least a
few
more years?”

Roger looked back and forth between his wife and his daughter, seeing Angelique’s worry and a familiar stubbornness in Elizabeth’s eyes. He knew where she’d gotten that, just as he knew where she’d gotten her temper, and his lips twitched for a moment as he wondered how his subjects would have reacted to the knowledge that their monarch, the man proposing to build a military capable of defeating the second largest navy in the entire galaxy, recognized defeat when he saw it in a
twelve-year-old’s
eyes. But that didn’t mean he had to surrender without a fight or that he couldn’t wage a valiant delaying action first, he reminded himself.

“Your Mom’s right, Beth,” he said. “I think I understand what you’re saying. Of course, when I was your age, learning to be King was the last thing I was interested in! It was the
Navy
I wanted, but I was just as stubborn. Well, maybe not
just
as stubborn; I don’t think there’s anyone this side of Monroe who’s really as stubborn as you are. But I was
pretty
stubborn, and your grandmother had a terrible time dealing with me. It was kind of like Mikey and the crown oak, I guess.”

Elizabeth giggled, and he smiled and ruffled her hair again.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “This isn’t one of those we’ll-argue-back-and-forth-about-the-terms-of-the-deal deals, either—it’s one of those take-it-or-leave-it, nonnegotiable, Daddy-decree deals. Got it?”

She looked at him for a moment, obviously considering the terms, then nodded, and he nodded back.

“I don’t think you’re ready to start going off to Cabinet meetings and diplomatic conferences with me just yet. In fact, I seem to remember someone who fell asleep halfway through her very first state dinner about a year ago. I wonder who that might have been?”

He raised his eyebrows at her, and she giggled again, looking suddenly much more like a twelve-year-old than someone twice that age.

“So here’s the deal. If you have any questions you want answered about current events, or what I’m discussing with Duke Cromarty, or something you’ve seen on HD, like
Into the Fire
, or on the public boards, or any of that kind of stuff, I’ll answer them. And Elisa and Jacob will answer questions for you, too. But I’m not going to haul you in to listen to all of those endless conferences and arguments and planning sessions a king has to deal with. Not yet. I think Mom’s absolutely right about your being too young just yet, even though I know you’re already tired of hearing that. Trust me, you’ll be even
more
tired of it by the time you hit high school . . . and we’ll be pretty darned tired of telling you so. But if you’re still interested when you turn fifteen, I’ll let you start sitting in on at least some of those boring conferences then.

“I’m pretty sure you’ll decide they’re nowhere near as interesting as you thought they might be, but you’re right. One day you will be Queen, and even though Mom’s right that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, you’re going to be Heir for a long time, and the Heir has a lot of responsibilities of her own, including ribbon cuttings, really tedious speeches, and smiling and being polite and attentive at political rallies the King can’t make it to—and is just
delighted
to send someone else off to in his place! A lot of it’s more boring than anyone who isn’t the Heir—or the queen consort—” he looked up again to give Angelique a flashing smile “—could possibly believe, but it
is
going to be your job, and however boring it may be, it really is important, too. So I guess it won’t hurt to let you start sort of easing your way into it early.”